


Smiles: For the generation of,

by wildechilde17



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4929553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildechilde17/pseuds/wildechilde17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Smiles have been few and far between since the death of Mark Watney on Sol 6 and the Hermes has a long journey to make to get back to earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Apparently there were people in the world, the Commander for one, who didn’t like lab mice. They were all scientists but Commander Lewis said she preferred rocks and things that didn’t skitter about or at very least took orders from her.

She liked the mice, especially up here. They were like having several very small house pets you weren’t allowed to play with. She knew he’d given them names. In all his log entries and lab reports they were subject 1, subject 2 and so on but when he was quietly measuring them, weighing them, running them through experiments, she’d heard him call them peaches, quince and cumquat under his breath.

It made her smile. She wanted to ask why they were all fruit themed names but then she’d be giving away that she’d been paying attention when no one else had. But smiles had been few and far between since Mark Watney had died on Sol 6, so she imagined that she could put the doctor’s fruity names for his lab mice in a file marked ‘smiles: for the generation of.’

He was smitten, properly, old fashioned smitten. He hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until Martinez had called her Tinkerbell all day and now couldn’t work out how to get the David Hasselhoff posing naked with puppies desktop background and screen saver off his login. It wasn't like they had internet as they traversed the solar system, she'd brought that picture with her.

She didn’t flinch when the pilot tried his seventy fifth attempt to remove the image and failed. Martinez had sworn so many times that the sentence he produced had stopped making sense. She just quietly wrinkled her nose as one corner of her mouth twisted up and then put her head phones on. Beck could see she’d worked out that the military seam that ran through Martinez and Lewis would keep him from running to the Commander to snitch. He had no doubt by the time the Commander came off personal time Hasselhoff and his puppy modesty protection would have vanished into the sys-ether.

The thing was he’d had a crush on Tinkerbell when he was a kid and still too young to know what a crush was. Tinkerbell was feisty and tiny but curvy in a way that registered somewhere deep down in his hindbrain. When Johanssen tucked her hair behind her ear when she was running numbers faster than he ever thought humanly possible he could see exactly where Martinez had dredged the nickname from.

Dr Chris Beck reflected, he and his hindbrain really needed to stop smiling at the little Sys-ops specialist or he was going to get confined to quarters.


	2. Chapter 2

She’d done ‘exceedingly’ well in isolation, the way they had said exceedingly had made her almost certain they didn’t think it was a good thing. She’d been hiding out in her bedroom gaming and hacking since she had worked out how to override the locks her parents had tried in an effort to keep her down to two hours of computer time a day. It wasn’t lying, her computer time was only two hours in the day time. Isolation was just another hoodie she could pull up over her head and avoid being socially awkward with.

NASA had no concerns with her skill set, math and computer science and a smaller calorie count than anyone else on the crew but Psych was always taking their little notes insinuating that maybe she didn’t communicate well enough to survive the journey to and from Mars in such close proximity to five other people and no way out.

Watney and Beck though, they got it, extroverts with a knack for bringing her out of her shell enough and smart enough to stop talking when they knew she had something more important to say. Without Watney and Beck she wouldn’t be on the team and that would have sucked a major amount of ass. But without her Watney and Beck wouldn’t be making it to Mars in the first place. They were all pieces of the code, chop any bit out and…

Beck got a little loopy without anyone to talk to, he liked people. After you got through the origin and insertion of every muscle, all the cranial nerves and naming every bone in the body, you missed people, or lab mice. So when the psychologist asked what he was a doctor of like they didn’t know he almost giggled as ‘of the soul’ came spurting out of his mouth.

Psychologists and psychiatrists, mad the lot of them, always looking for proof you were crazy too. Honestly he just wanted to head back to bed, the isolation had messed with his circadian rhythm. The other thing he missed was hearing the sound of Johanssen’s bad kung fu movies carried down the hall, about a year into training and he couldn’t fall properly asleep without the foley sounds of kicks and punches as a lullaby.


End file.
